Anne-Hélène Miller is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and currently serving as Rigssby Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee- Knoxville.

Recently, she co-edited with Daisy Delogu an MLA Teaching Approaches to Teaching the Romance of the Rose (2023) and has an upcoming book, The Invention of Frenchness: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries in the Literary Languages of Medieval France (Liverpool University Press, 2026)

While at the American Academy in Rome, she will be focusing on her current book project, Legacies of the Later Crusades in French Literature: Loss, Trauma, and “Survivance” (15th-16th centuries) that considers a body of emotionally charged literature focusing on the crusades during a crucial period of transition in Western culture. Crusading was a papal industry, and nearly everything related to early-modern crusading that emanated from the Papacy is found in the Vatican Library and Archives. 

I will examine Pope Pius II’s works as well as some writings by Italian Humanists Birago, Biondo, Accolti found in the Vatican library and archives. I will also examine a fifteenth-century French illuminated manuscripts of the “histoire d’Outremer” by William of Tyre, (such as Reg. Lat. 750) as well as seek to consult the original sermons and letters by Cardinal Bessarion, an exiled Byzantine Greek Humanist and diplomat to France as Patriarch of Constantinople.